The Cusp, The Cat and Giving Paul Potts A Seater.

Somehow… due to what can only be down to some sort of freak genetic mutation, my child doesn’t like sleep.

If I was really tired and someone gave me a nice bath, then a nice massage, wrapped me up in a fluffy sleeping bag and then practically begged me to sleep for as long as I possibly could; that would be one of the best days of my life. Yet trying to get The Baby to sleep is like trying to cycle up Gas Hill with flat tyres, whilst giving Paul Potts a seater.

Paul

When I was pregnant, The Man and I would enthusiastically chat about how relaxed we were going to be with our baby, because we didn’t want one of those babies who needed dark and quiet to sleep during the day. Our baby was going to be one of those ones that can sleep anywhere, anytime through anything. Oh the naivety.

Then I gave birth to the baby equivalent of a roulette table. If your baby never naps or sleeps, you can accept this and plan around it. If your baby always naps or sleeps, you can accept this and plan around it. I have no idea what will happen from one day to the next. This drives me insane. I like planning. A lot.

In particular, daytime naps are a real treat. You know you see babies who just beautifully drop off on their mother’s shoulder? Or those babies who are really sweetly asleep in their pram whilst their mum enjoys a leisurely stroll around the park? Not my baby. No. Even when she is displaying all the signs of tiredness… still no. But surely if she’s tired, she’ll just fall asleep right? HA! NO! Unless I facilitate a nap, The Baby will become a demon. Everything you do will be wrong. Pick her up? Wrong. Lay her down? Wrong. Place in the baby walker? Wrong. Attempt to put on a cardigan or coat? LIFE MIGHT AS WELL BE OVER.

My baby requires a very, VERY specific set of conditions before she will even entertain the prospect of a daytime nap. These are as follows:

• ·      In the pram, at or above a consistent, certain pram speed, over rough terrain. No smooth shop floors. No stopping. Pram pusher must walk, adhering to these conditions for approximately 20 minutes BEFORE nap will commence. Success rating: 85%
• ·      In the sling whilst the sling wearer is performing the bob-and-sway technique. The sling wearer must not sit during this time. The sling wearer must not talk during this time. Success rating: 90%
• ·      In the car. Travelling consistently at or above 60mph. Success Rating: 97%
• ·      In the cot, following a minimum 5 minute lay on the bed, leg rub, in dim lighting (the owl night light with a muslin draped over it), lullaby on the iPad, wearing 1.5 tog sleeping bag. Success rating: 4%

I know what you’re thinking… The Baby clearly DOES nap, so just use the pram, sling or car techniques all the time. Well this is EXHAUSTING. Genuinely. Particularly when The Baby can require 4 or 5 naps per day. It is also expensive in terms of petrol. Plus, there are only so many times you can drive up and down the A47 or A11 before you want to drive OFF the A47 or A11. So I work REALLY hard on the cot idea so that there is a CHANCE I can have 30 sacred minutes to do things like eat some lunch, do a wee, clear a pathway through the baby paraphernalia to the couch or, you know, breathe for a minute.

So following the setup of the above cot conditions, we then enter an intense negotiation period (similar, I imagine, to those which occur in the White House at a time of national unrest). Then, all being well, we reach what I call The Cusp.

I cannot emphasise the importance of The Cusp. It is a pivotal period that sometimes will solely determine how the rest of my day will turn out. It only lasts between 30 seconds – 2 minutes, but it is of upmost importance. Sometimes I have quite literally felt as though the future of my own life depends upon The Cusp.

The Cusp is the collection of moments whereby The Baby is not quite awake… but not quite asleep. The eyes are ½ to ¾ closed. All is still. Breathing has slowed. Sleep is close. So. Very. Close. But The Cusp has to be a collection of moments that are perfectly still. No new noises. No new movements. The introduction of either of these could set you right back to negotiation stage. For the sake of your own sanity, THIS CANNOT HAPPEN. You could have spent 50 minutes getting to The Cusp. You cannot go back now. You must get to the sleep. Then, if sleep arrives, you can ever so gently back away like a stealthy CIA operative on a life-saving mission and maybe.. just maybe.. sit down for 5 minutes.   

If you know me, you will know that things happen to me that you literally couldn’t make up. Ridiculous things that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Mr Bean movie. But I genuinely believe that life has saved up the best of these moments for now. For The Cusp.

Genuine things that have happened during the few vital seconds of The Cusp:

• ·      2 x Harley Davidsons (not just motorbikes, HARLEY DAVIDSONS) have confused my residential street for Brands Hatch.
• ·      Early Tesco Delivery. If you have Tesco Deliveries, you will understand how rare this is. Unless of course, you are in the midst of a Cusp.
• ·      Marge. My cat. I swear to GOD she has a CuspDar. She just KNOWS. She does it every, single, time. She can be outside and across the street when the nap commences. Yet she will come through the cat flap and up the stairs JUST at the time of The Cusp. And I SWEAR she has a true and meaningful desire to fuck things up. She has jumped across The Baby, on The Baby, she has knocked over every moveable object in the room, she has drunk water from the baby bath more loudly than a hippo belly flopping off a diving board into a swimming pool. Always. During. The Cusp. So successful is she at screwing up naps, that we have now renamed her The Nap Destroyer. So Marge cannot be in the room. However if you are stuck in the middle of a Cusp and you hear her coming, it adds a new dimension to the difficulty rating. It requires a two-man team to hold back Marge. We very frequently have a hall landing stand-off. It is a good job that I have a history of playing netball, because the Marge Prevention Strategy requires skill. Please follow this link to observe a video representation of what occurs in my hallway between myself and Marge at least 2 times per day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qddNUznTxlI

The Nap Destroyer

• ·      Bone cracking. That’s right. My elbow and hip have cracked during The Cusp. Both have ruined The Cusp.
• ·      Leaf blowing, Gutter washing or Strimming. (Norse genuinely appear to have a contract to clean the shit out of our road as noisily as possible at the specific times I am trying to get my baby to sleep.)
• ·      All the traffic from the M25 has been redirected down my road. (Actually it’s probably just the school run mums… but sounds like the former)
• ·      Full tree removal. Workmen have come to remove an ENTIRE TREE from outside my house during The Cusp. TWICE.
• ·      A boy/man wearing nothing but Calvin Klein boxers has commenced paint stripping on next doors roof, which coincidentally is right outside the bedroom window.
• ·      A primary school trip of approximately 150 children has chosen to conduct what I can only assume is an experiment to see how noisily they can walk down a street.
• ·      A taxi beeped it’s horn. This was particularly painful, as the first beep did not ruin The Cusp. The FIVE consecutive beeps did. 
• ·      Floorboards have given up the will to hold up my body weight and made a horrific cracking sound in places that have previously been strong enough to hold up a giant wardrobe.
• ·      I have punched the sofa out of pure frustration (but also safety, because it is squishy), yet accidentally caught the edge of the remote control (the Apple remote control which, by the way, is the smallest remote control invented) and injured my knuckle so badly that we now believe it was fractured.
• ·      A mutant fly the size of a small rodent, with a flying sound rivaling an AK47 has flown through a door at the very back of our house, down the hall, up the stairs, round 2x corners and performed a descending loop before landing on the cot. During The Cusp. Ruining The Cusp.
• ·      The Man decided to take a door off it’s hinges and plane it. This was the day he nearly regained his status as a single man.

The next day however, I will do exactly the same thing because The Baby is displaying exactly the same level of tiredness and The Baby will go to sleep straight away and sleep for 2 hours.  There is literally NO PATTERN to how The Baby functions. And don’t think I make that statement lightly. I have researched, hypothesized, tested and re-tested almost every reasonable method available. We’ve routined, we’ve non-routined, we’ve ‘gone with the flow’, we’ve gadget-ed, we’ve skin to skinned. I even constructed a colour coded spreadsheet to try and detect any pattern. That’s right, a spreadsheet. No pattern detected.

Sigh.

Thank god for cake.

Google and Guinea Pig Noises.

We’ve all been there. Googled a symptom. Don’t deny it. Things like:

·      Red bump on fourth finger

·      Recurring itchy bicep

·      Hair loss only on right side of head

·      Left pupil slightly smaller than right

·      Clicking sound in kneecap

·      Urine slightly green

·      Twitch in lip on Mondays

And these are the Google diagnoses:

• ·      Red bump on fourth finger: Fourth Finger cancer; death
• Recurring itchy bicep: Bicep cancer; death
• ·      Hair loss only on right side of head: Hair follicle cancer; death
• ·      Left pupil slightly smaller than right: Imminent blindness; Pupil cancer; death
• ·      Clicking sound in kneecap: Kneecap amputation; Kneecap cancer; death
• ·      Urine slightly green: Multiple organ failure; Bladder cancer; death
• ·      Twitch in lip on Mondays: Lip cancer; death

These are of course supported by the ‘Comments’ section underneath each diagnosis:

Phil, 48 (Sussex): My lip was always twitching on a Monday and I ignored it. Now I’ve got no lips, can only eat fluids and have got 2 days to live.

Sandra, 26 (Glasgow): I noticed that my bicep was getting more and more itchy. It turned out that a poisonous foreign spider had laid its eggs in my arm. Now I’ve only got half a bicep and the doctor says I may one day wake up with a strong penchant for flies.

But no matter how far fetched the comments or suggestions are, you find a way to convince yourself that this is what is happening to you, as follows…

Well my arm has been really itchy. And I did go to America last year and go for a walk in that forest where there must have been spiders… and I DID get bitten on my arm. Shit. Maybe I got bitten by a spider. But that doesn’t necessarily mean there are spider eggs in my arm…. But I did read in my nans Take a Break magazine about that woman who got bitten by a spider and the spider injected the eggs into her through a super spider egg tube and she didn’t even know….. Come to think of it, I can feel a little lump where it’s been itchy…. Maybe that’s the egg sac.

Then this festers for a few days until you have utterly convinced yourself that this is categorically what has happened and you must therefore go to the doctors.

And thus ensues the awkward conversation with the doctor whereby he is CLEARLY not doing his job correctly by even CONSIDERING the possibility of a spider egg sac in your arm. I mean sure, he’s had 7 years training and multiple years experience in the field, but you have put in a solid 4 hours on netdoctor and webmd, so clearly have the upper hand. So you basically have to do his job for him and very subtly suggest/ask whether it could be a spider egg sac in your arm causing the problem. Then he comes back at you with some logical, realistic, objective, medically sound response and you feel like an absolute plank. Then just before you leave, he very politely makes a joke about not googling symptoms on the internet as you quickly push the Google print-outs you brought deeper into your pocket.

NOW imagine that you have a vulnerable little person that you care about far more than yourself or any living thing on the planet and that you are solely responsible for.

And imagine the games that Google can play with you now.

The thing is, if you’re like me, you know jack squat about babies. They are like squirmy alien creatures to you. There is no logic, reason or predictability. And these are 3 things that I love and thrive upon.

You THINK you’re prepared for one because you’ve read the baby books, been to antenatal classes and spoken to your Friends With Children. You think you’re prepared for one because ‘how hard can it really be?’. You think you’re prepared for one because you’ve successfully raised 4 hamsters, 3 cats and 17 goldfish in your lifetime. You think you’re prepared for one because you are 2 relatively well-educated individuals that are pretty good at solving a problem.

THEN….. 9 months later….  The Baby makes a noise like a guinea pig when she sleeps.

You can basically hear your degree, your baby books, your 4 hamsters, 3 cats and 17 goldfish laughing in your face.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN? Is this normal? Does she have a breathing problem? Is something restricting her airway? Has she been born with only one lung? Is she getting enough oxygen into her body? Is she allergic to the air? WHAT IF SHE IS ALWAYS GOING TO SOUND LIKE A GUINEA PIG AND HAS TO ENDURE A LIFETIME OF BULLYING?

This shit was not in your baby book or your antenatal class.

Enter Google.

….. ‘newborn baby making guinea pig noises when sleeping’……

Categorically, the first four sites will be concocted of the following:

• ·      BabyCentre
• ·      netmums
• ·      MumsNet
• ·      Whattoexpect

And if you’re extra lucky..

·     

• Yahoo Answers

Now don’t get me wrong, the first four sites have their moments of genuine usefulness. But holy god above the threads from the discussion forums are the work of Satan.

Literally whatever thread you click on, there will be a variant of each of the following responses:

• ·      Perfectly normal (BreezyBev1966)
• ·      Probably ok, but best to talk to your GP (MaybeBaby23)
• ·      Will happen forever (NoSleepSuze44)
• ·      Will stop tomorrow (WorzelMummage)
• ·      I magically solved this problem by doing this (insert crazy method here) p.s. I am amazing (MumzRBest)
• ·      I had this problem and it turned out my child had a serious disorder… sure yours will be fine though. (LoopyMumsy)

Now bear in mind that when you are researching this point, the chances are that you are a hormonal whirlpool on the ‘high’ setting and haven’t slept for a significant period of time. So your brain makes the following conclusions…

• ·      Perfectly normal: Oh thank god **chuckles at self for even worrying about it**

**Please note… you could stop reading here, now that you’ve found out it is normal. But NOBODY does.

• ·      Probably ok, but best talk to your GP: **anxiety pang** Well if I should talk to my GP, that’s probably bad. Oh god there’s something wrong. I won’t be able to get an appointment for 2 days. By then something terrible might have happened.
• ·      Will happen forever: Oh my god. I will never be able to sleep again **panic**
• Will stop tomorrow: Feel hopeful. Then remember the previous two posts.
• ·      I magically solved this problem by doing this.. (insert crazy method here).. p.s. I’m awesome: Call The Man through and talk about how ‘it’s worth a try’. Send man to buy equipment for crazy method immediately. (p.s. it won’t work)
• ·      I had this problem and it turned out my child had a serious disorder… sure yours will be fine though: Nervously laugh at the ridiculousness of this comment, but secretly panic this is what’s happening to your baby. Google the serious disorder and play ‘Symptom Match.’ Find that you are able to match at least 2 other symptoms. Decide this means The Baby has the serious disorder.  Show The Man who laughs at your ridiculousness. (The Man secretly Googles it later to double check)

So what started as ‘my baby is making guinea pig noises when she sleeps’ ends in a diagnosis of multiple lifelong baby disorders, reflux, asthma and multiple queries over whether your baby is at the correct developmental stage, because babymutha from Mumsnet has a baby the same age who can cook his own dinner and is studying for an A Level in statistics already. (Don’t even get me started on the passive aggressive ‘my baby is better than yours’ threads).

Despite this… Despite knowing that Google only creates more problems than it solves… I have Googled approximately 473,665,000 baby questions in 5 months. Because quite a lot of the time, there is no one to ask these silly little questions and I don’t really know how you’re supposed to know the answers. Lots of people say ‘trust your instinct’… but unfortunately a lot of the time my ‘instinct’ tells me to ask Google. Or to eat biscuits.

At the end of the day, I suppose you do whatever you’ve got to do to make sure that squirmy little alien is ok.

p.s. Some of the things I have actually Googled since having a baby:

• ·      Is my baby too hot?
• ·      Is my baby too cold?
• ·      Baby making lots of noise when sleeping
• ·      Baby completely silent when sleeping
• ·      Is 9 poops a day normal?
• ·      Baby not pooped in 2 days
• ·      Crumbs in baby’s poop
• ·      Baby feeding 12 times per day
• ·      Baby only fed 4 times today
• ·      Baby seems to move right arm more than left
• ·      Will my baby be bald forever?
• ·      Can a baby be too fat?
• ·      1 month old baby not sleeping
• ·      2 month old baby not sleeping
• ·      3 month old baby not sleeping
• ·      4 month old baby not sleeping
• ·      5 month old baby not sleeping
• ·      How long until you die from sleep deprivation?

The Phlegm of Death, Tom Hanks and Blankety Blank.

Holy. God. Above. The Baby has had her first cold.

Except I’m not going to refer to it as a cold. I’m going to refer to it as The Phlegm of Death. A little dramatic you might think? Well there a couple of facts you need to know before you jump to this conclusion:

    1)  Babies cannot sniff or blow their nose

    2) Babies are obligate nose breathers

In simple terms… it means they can’t eat. Or sleep. Or blow their nose. Or choose to breath through their mouth. Please take a second to think this through.

I imagine (and hope) that none of you have ever tried to latch on to a breast and drink milk with a blocked nose. Well let me inform you that it is traumatic for all involved. This, coupled with no sleep and you have a recipe for creating your very own Damien.

What I have found particularly interesting is how baby companies and baby media try to make baby colds sound cutesy. Let me dispel that myth for you in the following table of common phrases related to Baby Colds that are bollocks:

Term	Truth
Snuffles	Deranged piglet noises.
A bit of mucus	Some mutant form of everything-resistant mucus, with a consistency and staying power similar to cement.
Unsettled	Literally off their rocker.
‘Common’ Cold	Unsure what is ‘common’ about it. Only if your baby changing into a Satanic Mucus Limpet is common.
Your baby will need comforting	You won’t know what your baby will need. Your baby won’t know what your baby will need. If there is a God…. God doesn’t know what your baby will need.

Interestingly, The Baby is only suffering from 1x cold problem. Nasal congestion. No runny nose. No temperature. No red eyes. Just some Death Phlegm that is well and truly lodged in the attic of her nose. And although I am grateful for the lack of other symptoms…. The Phlegm of Death has nearly brought us adults just that…. Death. This is like the parenting version of Tough Guy or the Marathon des Sables. Except I genuinely think I would rather wade through ice cold water and avoid live electrical cables than endure this again.

There are two sides to it you see. The genuine torture of having to watch The Baby suffer and struggle and not be able to do anything to help. And the sheer physical and psychological pain of having less sleep than The Newborn Days.

You see, if there is a problem, I like a solution. And I like to implement that solution to solve the problem. Let me give you a little insight into the suggested solutions to The Phlegm of Death:

Suggested Solution	Truth
Raise the head of the cot by placing a pillow underneath the mattress.	Does fuck all. Except make your baby look like a slumped drunken old man and end up diagonally across the cot with head lodged between 2 cot barriers.
Sit in bathroom whilst the shower is on to produce steam.	Does fuck all. Don’t care what Margaret (48) from MumsNet says. Well actually… it dramatically increases your water bill, damages electronic devices you may be using for amusement and gives you heat stroke.
Use saline spray	Increases deranged piglet noises. Makes the Phlegm of Death laugh in your face.
Use a nasal aspirator.	Although there is nothing more romantic than the sound of your loved one attempting to suck snot out of The Baby’s nostril through a tiny tube at 4am, this also does fuck all. Except suck out the aforementioned saline spray, rendering it even more useless.
Put a few drops of vapour oil in a bowl of warm water and place on top of the radiator.	This will clear the nostrils of your window that is directly above your radiator. It will also increase your heating bill. To conclude… does fuck all.
Use a dummy with a special contraption that delivers vapor directly to The Baby’s nose.	Does fuck all. Except make The Baby look like a Mini Bane from Batman (see picture) and provide an exciting hand-grasping-toy that serves to further reduce sleeping time.

The Baby with the Vapour Dummy

Some people don’t like to taint their babies with medicine. I’m all for it. When I was pregnant, I wanted The Baby’s life to be as pure and organic as possible, free from chemicals and additives etc. Then when she developed reflux, I realized I actually wanted The Baby’s life to be as comfortable as possible.. and as quiet as possible at night… so I could sleep. Enter my good friends Gaviscon and Calpol. In all seriousness, when you have to watch your baby suffer, there’s only so far that Essence of Leaf and Extract of Compost will take you. Eventually you just need someone to give you the good stuff. Drugs. Unfortunately… there is NOTHING you can give a baby for congestion. Even the doctor looked at us with sorrowful eyes as he delivered this news. He could see the desperation in our eyes… The sleep deprivation residing in our under-eye suitcases. So as much as I wanted to inject The Baby with a pure form of Lemsip Max, there was nothing we could do.

We had no choice but to implement Survival Mode. This mode had not been used since The Newborn Days. Survival Mode involves the following:

• ·      Strictly no offensive manoeuvres (i.e. any current nap routine implementation is abandoned, cease trying to encourage new baby skills and development, do not attempt to plan any enjoyable activities for yourself)
• ·      Full retreat and assume defensive positions (i.e. only use tried and tested calm activities, sounds and movements, prepare night time battle plan, prepare mental resilience for a battering)
• ·      The single objective is SURVIVAL (i.e. eat when and what you can, sleep when and where you can, abandon unnecessary social conversation or activities, all communication is purely strategic)

Hands down, the worst part of the Phlegm of Death is the approach to bedtime. We liked to call this ‘Entering The Tunnel Of Darkness’. You don’t know how long it’s going to last, you don’t know what horrors the tunnel is going to be bring… but you know it’s going to take you to dark, dark places and you know it’s going to be long. So very long.

Here are my Top Tips for Survival:

• ·      When you are singing gentle lullabies or talking gently to your screaming baby for 4 hours in the middle of the night, try expelling your frustration and anger by adapting the words, yet maintaining the calm and gentle tone. For example instead of ‘Rock A Bye Baby on the tree tops’… try and fit in ‘Go to sleep or I’m going to throw you out of the window’ instead. For inspiration, please enjoy Samuel L Jackson’s adaptation of a familiar bedtime story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sOA_U3-HOs

• ·      Play to your strengths. The Man had far more stamina for rocking, whereas I have boobs.

• ·      Disregard any form of diet. Get snacks. Many, many snacks. At times… this will be the only source of joy that you have.

• ·      Drive up and down the A11 between the hours of 4am and 7am having only had 2 hours sleep for the last 2 nights. I would say this is the closest to death through lack of sleep I have ever felt. But The Baby slept.

• ·      Try not to get upset when you look like Tom Hanks at the end of Philadelphia. This will pass.

• ·      Try to come up with a motivational tag line whilst you are in Survival Mode. Ours was ‘Keeping it moist’ to the tune of Blankety Blank. (The doctor had told us the quickest way to get rid of the Phlegm was to keep it moist… we were Moist Masters)

• ·      Whilst walking the hundreds of miles with the pram that you inevitably will and all of your muscles hurt from being awake for so long; try to have conversation topics prepared such as ‘Times when we have felt happy’, ‘Things you’re looking forward to’ and ‘What we miss most about sleep.’

• ·      Even though you know it won’t work, use your savings to buy every single de-snuffle gadget that Boots and Mothercare sell. Sure, this may mean you have to go back to work a month earlier… but at least you got an extra 30 minutes sleep.

• ·      On a serious note…. Cuddles.

Even when The Baby did eventually go to sleep, it turned out that despite it all, I couldn’t sleep myself, because I was worried she would stop breathing or forget she could breathe through her mouth. Because like I’ve said before… she rocks my world.